The title is based off a favorite quote of mine, courtesy Ralph Waldo Emerson.
It's also my way of warning you that blog posts here can be quite long. ;) But there's no skimming the surface for me when it comes to topics I care enough to write about.

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

There is a silent revolution brewing in the
enterprise, and it is not cloud computing any more. Cloud computing, while
evolving from blue-sky thinking to mainstream phenom in a few years, has resulted
in several ripple effects across IT.One that is particularly disturbing for IT
managers is Shadow IT, or the
introduction of technology within a company from the bottom-up. This refers to
situations where new products and solutions are not brought in via a
centralized evaluation and purchase process with oversight from the powers that
be, but from the people in the trenches.And not necessarily from select people in the
trenches – the enterprise architects or software engineers who can perhaps be
relied on to conduct their due diligence prior to acquiring new technology, but
anyone in the company, regardless of their title and pay-scale can be the
initiator.One doesn’t have to look far to understand way. Business moves fast,
and end-users want to keep up. Leveraging many of the SaaS-based tools and
products out there allows them to do exactly that. Astute IT leaders are caught
between a rock and a hard place - they don’t want IT being viewed as the anchor
that slows innovation and growth, but they also don't want to see business
being hurt on their watch due to lapses in security, compliance or performance.As one starts digging deeper, the nature of this
problem becomes more apparent. Products traditionally deployed within
enterprises have been vetted by IT and set up for proper security and
manageability, but they can have gaps and tend to be harder to use. A few years
ago, employees had no choice but to reach for the nearest set of manuals, call
Help Desk and log a ticket, or spend hours and days attending webinars and training
sessions before they were able to use those products. Now, the prevailing
feeling is “if a product requires me to read a manual, it’s friggin broken!”Fueling that feeling, there's an ecosystem comprising hundreds of vendors offering various tools and solution alternatives in the cloud. Individual, group and department-level users are tempted to sign up, evaluate and/or use these software without IT's involvement. These are tools that are sometimes free, or may
cost a few hundred dollars per month and easily fit into the budget of many
managers. At times, even non-managerial
employees happily sign up for some of these services using their personal
credit card, given the immense productivity gains and ease-of-use they bring to
the table.By
the time IT becomes aware, that software may already be well entrenched in the
organization regardless of its quirks (or ahem... security holes) that IT is
now forced to deal with.These scenarios have placed IT in the crosshairs
to take control of the situation, scan workstation logs and network ports for
rogue usage, and enforce requisite standards for user privacy, data confidentiality,
scalability and manageability. But punitive measures don’t
exactly endear IT to their business counterparts - a recent survey by InformationWeek finds less than half of non-IT personnel regard
IT to be integral to their business. Nor are such measures 100% effective.The reality is that technology purchasing is undergoing unprecedented decentralization and that is here to stay. Attempting to control or put an
outright stop to these practices is akin to swimming upstream and will
eventually fail. Leading analyst firms estimate as much as 35% of enterprise
technology spend will fall outside the IT department's budget within the next two
years.So what is a CIO to do?I recently watched an Andreessen Horowitz video The Renaissance of Enterprise Computing
where Gary Reiner, former CIO of General Electric says “if I was a CIO now, my
job would be much more about procuring solutions than managing people.”Gary’s statement points to the elephant in the room.
IT has to participate in the process and
guide it, rather than attempting to confront and control it.But that may seem easier said than done. IT is its own victim due to the
segregated collaboration tools and linear approval mechanisms such as ticketing
systems and intranet portals implemented in the past. These intrinsically
suffer from excessive communication latency and workflows that are hard-pressed
to meet the urgency associated with seemingly mundane technology requests from business. End
users are no longer content to send an email or log a ticket and wait for IT to
act on it. They instead turn to the latest SaaS provider their spouse or neighbor was
talking about, and are off and running in minutes and hours rather than days
and weeks.Newly launched SelectHub
is designed to address this very issue. SelectHub enables both end-users and IT, along with
other key stakeholders (Procurement, Finance, Enterprise Architecture and
budget owners/managers) to be in lockstep throughout the evaluation process.
Any of the above stakeholders can initiate an evaluation project within
SelectHub with just a few clicks, invite other key personnel, assign them specific
roles and each party can proceed to specify the scope, requirements and success
criteria that matter most to them as well as engage in peer-level conversations
regarding each area’s necessity and impact. Project participants would have visibility to
all or part of the project, based on their roles. Regardless
of whether a software project conforms to a centralized top-down purchasing
model, or occurs at a grassroots level, SelectHub serves as the tactical link
between IT and business to accelerate evaluation and rollout of the right
solution while enhancing IT participation and governance. Instead of treating each other as policy
violators or innovation stoppers, both parties can pool their expertise and
achieve measurable progress while eliminating altogether the fragmented
communication and back-and-forth delays associated with emails and tickets.Shadow
IT inevitably results in loss of control and compromised security. With
SelectHub, IT can take affirmative action by initiating or participating in, and
influencing the evaluation process to orchestrate a reasonably satisfactory
outcome for all stakeholders.

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About Venkat S. Devraj

Previously, co-founder of Stratavia, a data center and cloud automation software company, acquired by Hewlett-Packard. Prior to that, I was CEO at ExtraQuest, a database managed services provider that was acquired by a private syndicate and became datAvail.